Design and Open Source

Speedism at MEx

April 11, 2010

I had the pleasure of attending a performance by the architecture duo Speedism (Julian Friedauer (Germany) and Pierterjan Ginckels (Belgium)) at MEx on Friday night. Its hard to describe – they call it a “live Photoshop” – my best effort would be “8bit situationists explore a futurist distopia through live animation”. Sort of a puppet show for architects. They manipulate a large Photoshop file in real time to a soundtrack with elliptical supertitles (and a smoke machine). Part of the pleasure (at least for the assembled designers) was the transparency of the mechanisms of the performance – neither the little white pointer nor the occasional popups were hidden, and the performers sat in front of the screen with their laptops and graphics tablets.

Check them out if they’re performing in your neighbourhood. Their website, incidentally, looks much more like Friday’s performance than the video they have available.